Born and raised in the Bay Area (Oakland and San Francisco) and now living in the California mountains, MAX CAPACITY is well known for his early Glitch Art, Animated GIFs, his DOS Punks reworking of Crypto Punks, releasing his work openly into the Public Domain (CC0), founding communities such as the Analog Video Union, and working with often obsolete analog video technologies such VHS tapes, VCRs, and old school computers to make his Digital Art. He vividly remembers the cyberpunk glitches of Max Headroom from his childhood. Obviously, CAPACITY named himself after Headroom. He is deeply inspired by the legendary icon whose creation helped canonize glitch aesthetics in the 1980s. Both maxes, MAX CAPACITY and Max Headroom created foundations for Glitch Art as we know it today.
In 1982, artist MAX CAPACITY was born into the increasingly cyberpunk world of the early Eighties in California. As he says: “I basically lived in Silicon Valley. My dad worked in Silicon Valley so I would drive around with him in the middle of the night to weird warehouses where there were like 20 dudes on computers…” The same year of his birth, William Gibson’s genre defining cyberpunk story Burning Chrome reached readers in Omni magazine. Burning Chrome tells the story of hackers having adventures in cyberspace while living their gritty dystopian lives in The Sprawl (Out East) with a Californian dream of escaping to Hollywood (Out West) haunting them.
Two years later, in the heavily anticipated year of 1984, Gibson’s cyberpunk novel Neuromancer defined the genre more completely. Neuromancer radically transformed Orwellian science fiction prophecies into more ambivalent tales for our complex technological times. Building out from Burning Chrome, Gibson’s world-building expanded into the cyberpunk Sprawl Trilogy. Simultaneously, Apple Computers took up and transformed facts and fictions when they introduced the Apple Macintosh to the world. The company famously used imagery derived from George Orwell’s iconic novel 1984 to introduce personal computers as revolutionary tools for personal empowerment. Apple delivered computing into more homes and made Gibson’s cyberspace more real. The increasing reality of the virtual made folks familiar with simulations inside digital systems and nonlinear networks. This was the perfect time for a new character to appear on television screens, a figure who could bring it all together in the big, bold, bright colors of the 1980s.
Max Headroom appeared on screens in 1985. A cyberpunk AI celebrity, Headroom is “an artificial persona existing only inside TV monitors” as CAPACITY recounts. As he explains, Headroom directly connects, as a ‘rouge persona,’ to Neuromancer. In both worlds, consciousnesses are inside (computing) machines transmitting signals (to analog TVs). Both Headroom and Neuromancer, as AIs, emerge from technologies. They are technological entities made possible by and yet trapped inside these systems. And they both escape their technological constraints.
Americans were introduced to this character in the film Max Headroom: 20 Minutes into the Future on Cinemax. BBC Channel 4 introduced the character to England with The Max Headroom Show by Carlton TV (from 1985 to 1987). In these and other appearances Headroom expressed himself through his signature style of glitches, as if he was malfunctioning. This intentional ‘character flaw’of glitch became a cultural symbol of technology, the future, and cyberpunk. He encapsulated hopes and dreams about technologies so accurately and so far ahead of his time by being ambivalent about its promises. This Eighties ambivalence is also a hallmark of that era’s Punk Rock culture, putting the ‘punk’ in ‘cyberpunk’. “He was the perfect advertising spokesman,” says CAPACITY, “can’t trust him, but you’re going to listen!”
Written by jonCates, founder of Glitch Art Gallery && glitch.school ∞
"Max Capacity is a digital artist exploring the intersection of analog and digital media and the fetishization of obsolete tech. Working with glitch, AI, pixels, GIFs, text, sound, and video, the common theme throughout the work is finding beauty in decay, entropy, and disintegration through color, movement, and humor. Max Capacity first appeared on the internet in 2008 on Tumblr and Twitter. His work with glitch art and analog video art GIFs lead to features in publications including VICE, The Verge, and WIRED, and work exhibited on six continents, including in The Museum of the Moving Image in New York and the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto. Since 2021, Max Capacity has been working in cryptoart, minting on Ethereum, Solana, Tezos, and Bitcoin blockchains. His work in cryptoart has been featured at NFT and crypto events and galleries in Paris, CDMX, Riyadh, Rome, Berlin, Melbourne, Seoul, and Lisbon."
MAXCAPA.CITY
Born and raised in the Bay Area (Oakland and San Francisco) and now living in the California mountains, MAX CAPACITY is well known for his early Glitch Art, Animated GIFs, his DOS Punks reworking of Crypto Punks, releasing his work openly into the Public Domain (CC0), founding communities such as the Analog Video Union, and working with often obsolete analog video technologies such VHS tapes, VCRs, and old school computers to make his Digital Art. He vividly remembers the cyberpunk glitches of Max Headroom from his childhood. Obviously, CAPACITY named himself after Headroom. He is deeply inspired by the legendary icon whose creation helped canonize glitch aesthetics in the 1980s. Both maxes, MAX CAPACITY and Max Headroom created foundations for Glitch Art as we know it today.
In 1982, artist MAX CAPACITY was born into the increasingly cyberpunk world of the early Eighties in California. As he says: “I basically lived in Silicon Valley. My dad worked in Silicon Valley so I would drive around with him in the middle of the night to weird warehouses where there were like 20 dudes on computers…” The same year of his birth, William Gibson’s genre defining cyberpunk story Burning Chrome reached readers in Omni magazine. Burning Chrome tells the story of hackers having adventures in cyberspace while living their gritty dystopian lives in The Sprawl (Out East) with a Californian dream of escaping to Hollywood (Out West) haunting them.
Two years later, in the heavily anticipated year of 1984, Gibson’s cyberpunk novel Neuromancer defined the genre more completely. Neuromancer radically transformed Orwellian science fiction prophecies into more ambivalent tales for our complex technological times. Building out from Burning Chrome, Gibson’s world-building expanded into the cyberpunk Sprawl Trilogy. Simultaneously, Apple Computers took up and transformed facts and fictions when they introduced the Apple Macintosh to the world. The company famously used imagery derived from George Orwell’s iconic novel 1984 to introduce personal computers as revolutionary tools for personal empowerment. Apple delivered computing into more homes and made Gibson’s cyberspace more real. The increasing reality of the virtual made folks familiar with simulations inside digital systems and nonlinear networks. This was the perfect time for a new character to appear on television screens, a figure who could bring it all together in the big, bold, bright colors of the 1980s.
Max Headroom appeared on screens in 1985. A cyberpunk AI celebrity, Headroom is “an artificial persona existing only inside TV monitors” as CAPACITY recounts. As he explains, Headroom directly connects, as a ‘rouge persona,’ to Neuromancer. In both worlds, consciousnesses are inside (computing) machines transmitting signals (to analog TVs). Both Headroom and Neuromancer, as AIs, emerge from technologies. They are technological entities made possible by and yet trapped inside these systems. And they both escape their technological constraints.
Americans were introduced to this character in the film Max Headroom: 20 Minutes into the Future on Cinemax. BBC Channel 4 introduced the character to England with The Max Headroom Show by Carlton TV (from 1985 to 1987). In these and other appearances Headroom expressed himself through his signature style of glitches, as if he was malfunctioning. This intentional ‘character flaw’of glitch became a cultural symbol of technology, the future, and cyberpunk. He encapsulated hopes and dreams about technologies so accurately and so far ahead of his time by being ambivalent about its promises. This Eighties ambivalence is also a hallmark of that era’s Punk Rock culture, putting the ‘punk’ in ‘cyberpunk’. “He was the perfect advertising spokesman,” says CAPACITY, “can’t trust him, but you’re going to listen!”
Written by jonCates, founder of Glitch Art Gallery && glitch.school ∞
"Max Capacity is a digital artist exploring the intersection of analog and digital media and the fetishization of obsolete tech. Working with glitch, AI, pixels, GIFs, text, sound, and video, the common theme throughout the work is finding beauty in decay, entropy, and disintegration through color, movement, and humor. Max Capacity first appeared on the internet in 2008 on Tumblr and Twitter. His work with glitch art and analog video art GIFs lead to features in publications including VICE, The Verge, and WIRED, and work exhibited on six continents, including in The Museum of the Moving Image in New York and the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto. Since 2021, Max Capacity has been working in cryptoart, minting on Ethereum, Solana, Tezos, and Bitcoin blockchains. His work in cryptoart has been featured at NFT and crypto events and galleries in Paris, CDMX, Riyadh, Rome, Berlin, Melbourne, Seoul, and Lisbon."
MAXCAPA.CITY
Subscribe to joncates
Subscribe to joncates
<100 subscribers
<100 subscribers
Share Dialog
Share Dialog
No comments yet